We now come across statistics about the growing CO2 consumption of the digital economy ever more frequently. And not entirely without reason: while estimates put air traffic's share of global CO2 emissions at two to three per cent, almost four per cent of all CO2 emissions can currently be attributed to global digital technology. And it is not getting less: current studies forecast a rise in the digital economy's emissions to a full eight per cent of total CO2 output by 2025!
Worrying facts - how should we deal with them?
With rising consumption, the question increasingly arises of how we can operate as sparingly with resources as possible and use capacity in such a way that we do not live beyond our needs and impair the needs of future generations. In this context we all probably think of one term: sustainability. So far we have known it mainly from areas such as transport, use of materials or heating and cooling technologies. But since a large part of our lives now takes place online and digitalisation is advancing ever faster, it is no wonder that the great fields of development of our time, «digitalisation» and «sustainability», are converging - and so we come to digital sustainability.
Digital sustainability - resource-efficient hardware?
When it comes to digital sustainability we probably think first of resource-efficient hardware - after all, it does have to be physically manufactured, doesn't it? Definitely not entirely wrong: a substantial part of CO2 consumption arises during the manufacture of devices. Using them for as long as possible, repairing rather than throwing away immediately and replacing individual defective parts can be sensible measures here.
But the software is of just as much importance…
- because ever larger volumes of data, more resource-intensive operations and more complex programs are being developed and need to be processed and managed. Lean programming, the choice of an energy-saving programming language or modular extension options are possible levers for sustainable software. Software also has a certain influence on hardware lifespan: it should be programmed in such a way that it continues to run on older hardware for as long as possible and devices do not have to be replaced early because of incompatibility.
What actually characterises sustainable software?
In very general terms it can be said: sustainable software means software that places little burden on the environment along its life cycle. Sustainability concerns every phase of the software's life: its production, its use and finally its disposal. Ideally, software should therefore be efficiently programmed, mindfully used and recyclable. Besides the energy-efficient properties of the software itself, it can also contribute to sustainability by promoting the resource-efficient use of other IT systems: heating and ventilation systems or lighting, for example, can be controlled more energy-efficiently and processes optimised.
The interesting questions that now arise, of course, are what software should specifically look like in order to be sustainable. From server cooling to the complexity of the source code - what are the significant factors for sustainable software and how can they be improved? And conversely, what can users ultimately pay attention to when using it in order to act sparingly with resources? We will address all these questions in our next articles!
ANN, Bitcoin, video streaming - digitally sustainable?
by Elena Höppner Content MarketingPublished on 6/30/2022
According to studies, training a single artificial neural network (ANN) emits 313 tonnes of CO2, roughly five times as much carbon dioxide as a vehicle over its entire life cycle, including fuel. At currently around 125 terawatt hours of electricity per year, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin consumes a comparable amount of energy to the whole of Norway - which in total is almost four times as much as Switzerland at 58.1 terawatt hours. We consume roughly three hundred million tonnes of CO2 through the streaming of online videos alone.
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